They carry a lot of Japanese magazines, in addition to the compilations.

I've got a picture of a cover of Afutanuun (Dreamland Japan), so I'll
take a look for it next weekend.

Kanji are the semi-pictographs.  (I was mistaken, they have (apparently
borrowed) punctuation, what Japanese lacks is (proper) spaces and
capitalization).  (All Hiragana Japanese:
itwouldbelikewritingenglishinalllowercasewithnospaces) Kanji are the
amazingly compact form of writing where eightteen brush strokes indicate
one vowel, to be followed by half a dozen modifying Hiragana.

The advantage of sticking little Hiragana on the side of the Kanji is
that Hiragana are strictly phonetic, so you can look them up in the
"fifty sounds" table and get a romantic spelling for the word. (The
Kanji having helped define the word boundaries as above) Now comes the
tricky part, you've got to handle the conjugation, which is almost as
bad as english. (Just kidding, it's nowhere near, even with the strange
conjunctions) Finally you'll have a collection of words that make almost
no sense together and you'll need to reverse-engineer the sentence
structure. (Normal English word order is inverted Japanese word order
and the "world view" is different, but thank heavens they really are
human so it's not unbridgeable)

I'd suggest getting a subscription to Mangajin or at least picking up
"Basic Japanese through comics"

	Henry J. Cobb	hcobb@slip.net          http://www.io.com/~hcobb